Every Night Is Cake

The clock doesn’t dictate the pace. The pace is separate from the clock. The clock tells you it’s one. So what? It doesn’t have to be one. It could be two or three. It could be next Thursday. You don’t go by the clock. You go by what you see in front of you. Sixteen screens. The Sweet Sixteen. The guy who worked the night shift before you used to say every night was cake. You never got what that meant, but you didn’t worry about it. You are given the answer to one unanswerable question in this life, and you certainly aren’t going to use it trying to figure out what some lifelong third shifter meant when he said something about cake until one night he went home and never came back. They told you that you’d be working on your own after that. You were cool with it. The screens capture the experience of sixteen people all locked up. Nowhere to go. You tap on Screen Three. It’s the one that flickers. You tap on it and it’ll stop flickering for a minute or two. Sometimes you let it flicker. Why not? Does the flickering bother you? Why let such a little thing bother you? Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?

The cream in your coffee might be a little expired. Not a lot expired, but a little. Enough to make you think you don’t care enough about what you put in your body. The coffee sits in a mug you borrowed from the staff room. It says “Vicky” on it. Who the hell is Vicky? You never ask about that. It might be somebody on the day shift. Does she know you use her mug every night, rinse it out, and put it back where you found it? You like thinking about these minor aggressions that might not be anything at all. You like thinking about running red lights, but you never do it. You leave early to get here. Five to eleven every night, and there you are. Sitting in the chair with the stuffing coming out from behind the red cushions. Some back room in some back building where sixteen screens are sticking out of a wall and on each screen in one prisoner. You don’t know their names, but you call them by their numbers. Like that old Sci-Fi show The Prisoner. Number one, number two, and so on. Number Eight is your favorite. He likes to stand and stare right at the camera. He’ll smile right at it. Sicko. Piece of garbage. He’s out of his mind, and you love him. You want to be his friend. You want to be his best friend. You want to bust him out of prison and escape with him and go on a road trip like in Thelma and Louise.

Instead you stir your coffee. You try to make the expired cream go around until you can’t see it anymore. You think about adding sugar. Prisoner Nine is doing jumping jacks. Good for him. He’s going to die in there, but at least it won’t be from heart disease. Screen Three flickers. You tap it. It stops. For a second, you think the screen is empty. No prisoner. What would happen if he disappeared? Would you call someone? Who would you call? There’s no phone number. There’s no manual. There’s no contact list. You were put here and told to watch the screens. Nothing happens on the screens. What if something does happen? You see a fire alarm to your right. Would you push the fire alarm? What would that do? You can’t help yourself. You reach over. You touch the alarm. Something tells you it wouldn’t work if you pulled it. Something tells you nothing in this place works but the screens. Who knows if they work? You could be watching old footage from ten years ago. All these prisoners might be dead. Prisoner Eight might have escaped by now. He might already be on a road trip with the guy who left and never came back. Your predecessor. The one who said every night is cake. You should have suggested somebody do a wellness check on him. Do they have his address here? They don’t have yours. They never asked for it. They just know that if something happens to you, they’re to call your mother. Your mother and you don’t speak. It’s been three years of that. Doesn’t matter. If something goes wrong, they’ll call her and she’ll tell them she doesn’t have a son. It’ll be a great joke. Everybody’ll laugh.

Prisoner One sleeps the whole night. That’s what makes sense. They should all be sleeping. Prisoner One knows what to do. Prisoner One upholds logic. Prisoner One doesn’t care that the lights never turn off in any of the cells. Prisoner One doesn’t mind that soft music plays day in and day out. You can hear it from a little speaker by the phone. They want you to hear what the prisoners hear. You can’t communicate with them, but you can hear their music. That soft music that sounds like a song you used to like, but can’t listen to anymore. The one that used to play when the windows were open and the shower was running and somebody was waiting outside to take you to the beach. You haven’t been to the beach in years. You hear there’s red seaweed now. You hear you can’t go in the water. You hear the sand gets in your mouth and you taste it for days. Days and days.

Prisoner One sleeps and dreams of French cuisine. Duck something orange and beef something bunion and you can almost see his mouth watering. You want his dreams to be as vivid as possible. You want him to believe the dreams are his real life and that when he wakes up, he’s dreaming. You want the music to keep him asleep and you want to go to sleep, but you can’t, because the coffee is too strong and the lights are too bright. If they catch you sleeping, you get a warning. Two warnings, and you get a suspension. Two suspensions, and you lose a week’s pay. You’ve never even gotten a warning. You were Employee of the Month two months in a row. They gave you a gift certificate to the Olive Garden. You hear Paul Simon likes it there. You haven’t listened to Graceland in a while. That was your mother’s favorite album. You wonder if Prisoner Eight likes Paul Simon.

The coffee tastes funny. It might be the cream. It might be the mug that doesn’t belong to you. You take another sip. It tastes like cake. Screen Three flickers. You tap it. It flickers again. You tap it. It flickers. It goes out. It never goes out. You tap on it. You look for a plug. There is no plug. There’s nothing attached to the screen. Not to any of the screens. You tap harder on Three. Six goes out. You stop breathing. One by one. Three, Six, One, Fourteen. When Eight goes, you pull the fire alarm. Nothing happens. You watch as each of the Sweet Sixteen goes dark. When the last one terminates itself, you sit down in your chair. A piece of stuffing falls to the floor. You can still hear the music. It sounds like a song you used to like. You know you used to like it, but you can’t remember the words. Something about being young. Something about being free. You think about dreaming. You think about dreaming until you’re not sure if you’re still thinking about it, or if it’s actually a dream.